It was from this major medieval port that the Pilgrim Fathers – the first white settlers of the US – began their break for the freedom of the New World in 1607. These religious separatists suffered persecution and imprisonment, yet when word of their success made it back here, a crowd of locals followed them [...]
A new buzz with an old message has settled over the genteel market town of Bury St Edmunds of late. Once home to one of the most powerful monasteries of medieval Europe, the town has just seen the completion of its fine cathedral with a new Gothic lantern tower – a mere 500 years after [...]
Few cities can take the breath away quite like Cambridge. It’s not just its tightly packed core of exquisite architecture, or even the mind-boggling mass of brain power that has passed through its world-famous university, but also it’s the sensation of drowning in history, tradition and quirky ritual that only seems to deepen the more [...]
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking Cambridgeshire equals Cambridge, the breath-takingly beautiful city and world-renowned brains trust where a visit feels like plunging into the past and meeting the future rolled into one. And the university rightly tops any agenda to the region. But don’t let Cambridge’s dazzling attractions blind you to [...]
An easy and rewarding day trip from Cambridge, Ely (ee-lee) is a charming and historic city-town with a dazzling cathedral, scrupulously tidy Georgian and medieval centre and pretty riverside walks running out into the eerie fens around it. It’s a thriving place, and while it used to be something of a joke that such a [...]
Those that recall the colourful 12-year reign of Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, will find a fine model of her vision for Britain in the pleasing red-brick town of her birth. Baroness Thatcher first came into the world above her father’s grocery shop at 2 North Pde, now a chiropractor’s clinic with a [...]
Suffolk’s county capital was one of the very first Saxon towns in England, a thriving medi-eval centre of commerce and a major point of emigration to America. But while heavy investment jazzes up its lively waterfront marinas, in its centre beautiful timber-framed buildings moulder behind scruffy boards and ugly modern chain stores nudge medieval churches. [...]
Long labelled as ‘the Warehouse on the Wash,’ the medieval port town of King’s Lynn was once so busy with waterborne traders that it was said you could cross from one side of the River Great Ouse to the other by simply stepping from boat to boat. Staunchly pious citizens and wild-and-woolly sailors would mingle [...]
There’s barely a straight line in the whole of topsy-turvy Lavenham, Eastern England’s loveliest medieval wool town. Crammed into its centre are around 300 exquisitely preserved buildings that lean and lurch like old folks balancing their old wooden bones against each other. Lavenham reached its peak in the heady 15th-century wool wealth days, after which [...]
An undervisited delight, Lincoln’s tightly knotted core of cobbled streets and majestic medieval architecture is enough to leave visitors breathless, albeit as much for its thigh-pumping slopes as the superb stonework and timber-framed treasures to be found there. Uptown Lincoln is crowned by an extraordinary hill-topping cathedral, an unusual Norman castle and compact Tudor streets, [...]